01 The set
What is on this board
The Layer 2 label here folds four of CoinMarketCap's tags into one: Layer 2 proper, general scaling, rollups, and rollups-as-a-service. The top 1,000 by market cap holds 65 of them, and all 65 are on the board.
The one number worth having before you read the picture: this entire board is worth a fraction of one percent of the Layer 1 board. The chains here carry a large share of Ethereum's transactions between them, and the sector that does it is smaller than several individual coins on the front page. Whether that is an opportunity or an accurate price is the argument the section below is about.
The tag is also imprecise in a specific way: a couple of these are filed as Layer 1 too, and at least one large bubble here is an exchange token whose chain is a side business. Coins carry every tag that fits, and this one fits loosely.
Everything else works the way it does on the whole-market board: size is market cap, color is the price change over the period on the buttons, and grey means a coin barely moved. The longer version, with the exact color thresholds, is in the guide.
02 Movers
Biggest moves in the sector, last 24 hours
▲ Gainers
| Coin | Price | 24h | Volume |
|---|---|---|---|
| HEMIHemi | $0.0112 | +21.04% | $61M |
| STXStacks | $0.1625 | +20.04% | $21M |
| SNTStatus | $0.0062 | +18.82% | $17M |
| IMXImmutable | $0.1241 | +18.20% | $15M |
| ZORAZORA | $0.0057 | +12.36% | $16M |
▼ Losers
| Coin | Price | 24h | Volume |
|---|---|---|---|
| CCCanton | $0.1030 | -0.70% | $22M |
| ESPEspresso | $0.0848 | -0.26% | $26M |
| OKBOKB | $107.45 | +1.59% | $50M |
| ERACaldera | $0.0604 | +4.51% | $11M |
| RENDERRender | $1.47 | +4.78% | $43M |
Both tables are drawn from this board only, and every coin in them traded at least $10M in the past 24 hours. That volume floor is the same one the whole-market board uses, and it matters more here: a sector is a slice, so fewer coins clear a fixed dollar amount, and the ones that do not are exactly where a spectacular percentage turns out to be one buyer on a quiet market.
03 Background
What is a Layer 2?
A Layer 2 is a chain that borrows its security instead of buying it. It executes transactions somewhere cheaper, then posts the results back down to a Layer 1 — almost always Ethereum — which is what makes them final. Users get fees measured in cents rather than dollars, and confirmation in under a second, without trusting a company to hold their money. The base chain still decides what happened; the Layer 2 just does the work off to the side.
Two designs dominate. Optimistic rollups post the results and assume they are correct, leaving a window during which anyone can submit a proof that a specific result was wrong. That window is why withdrawing back to the base chain traditionally takes about a week. Zero-knowledge rollups post a cryptographic proof that the results are correct, which removes the waiting period and costs a great deal more compute to produce. Both are represented on this board, at very different sizes.
Here is the part that matters for reading this page: the token usually does not pay for security. On the Layer 1 board, the coin is what validators are paid and what an attacker must buy. Almost nothing on this board works that way. Security comes from Ethereum, and Ethereum is paid in ether. Fees on most of these chains are paid in ether too. So the token is left doing something else — voting on the treasury and the protocol's parameters, sometimes receiving a share of sequencer revenue, sometimes buying a discount or a slot in a shared sequencing scheme.
Which produces the sector's characteristic disconnect. A Layer 2 can process an enormous number of transactions, hold billions in deposits, and pass very little of that through to its token, because the mechanism connecting the two was never built or was built and switched off. Usage and token price are related here only as loosely as the design chooses to relate them. Anyone who reads a chart of transactions per second as a chart of a token's prospects is assuming a link that in this sector frequently does not exist. It is the single most common mistake made about these assets, and the picture above cannot warn you about it.
The revenue that does exist has an unusual cost line. A Layer 2 charges users a fee and pays the base chain for posting data. The difference is its margin, and it moves with congestion on a chain it does not control. When posting is cheap the sector is profitable; when the base layer is busy the same transactions cost more to settle than they earn. This is one of the few places in crypto with a genuine cost of goods sold, and it is indexed to somebody else's traffic.
Most of them are still centralised where it counts. The sequencer — the thing that decides transaction order — is typically run by one company, which can in principle censor, reorder, or stop. The designs mostly include an escape hatch letting users force transactions through the base chain if that happens. Decentralising the sequencer is the long-promised step across most of this board, and how far along any given project is differs enormously. Nothing about a bubble's size tells you which ones actually did it.
And the category is being redefined underneath itself. Chains that publish data to one place and settle to another, chains built with kits that make launching one a weekend project, chains that use a Layer 1's security without inheriting its execution — all get filed here. The boundary between this board and the Layer 1 board is blurred by design decisions, not by mistakes in the tagging. Read the label as "scales something else" rather than as a technical guarantee.
04 The app
The same filter, over the whole market
This page is one fixed slice: one sector, the largest names in it, four periods, prices in dollars. The app it was cut from carries all 1,000 coins and lets you set the filter yourself — by category, by chain ecosystem, by exchange — then keep what you found as favorites. Free, no ads, no account, and it runs in a browser tab as well as on a phone.
Open the full board →